Egypt has no choice

Nearly one year after the military coup against Mohammed Morsi, the first democratically elected president in the most populous Arab country, Egyptians are voting for a new president on Monday (26.05.2014) and Tuesday. Anyone who thinks that the elections will be a fair political contest with democratic rules is likely to be disappointed on closer inspection.

The vote is strongly reminiscent of the referendums held under long-time former President Hosni Mubarak. With Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, former field marshal and de facto ruler since July 2013, the winner has already been chosen. This week, Egyptians living abroad already voted with 94 percent for el-Sissi - a surprising, record-breaking approval rate one would think. Bu,t considering the developments in Egypt over the past 10 months, it is no surprise. But first things first.

Demonization and elimination of the opposition

Not only Egypt's leadership was deposed with the violent overthrow of Morsi. The country's Muslim Brotherhood sponsored constitution was also suspended.

After that, the military leadership around el-Sissi charged a select commission with drawing up a new constitution. A tailor-made basis for military guided “democracy” on the Nile was created in a hardly representative procedure and without the participation of the public.

What followed next had nothing to do with the free and democratic hopes of the revolution of January 25, 2011. The Muslim Brotherhood had been systematically criminalized and demonized as the dark danger for the fatherland in a hysterical media campaign by the regime-loyal media. The liberal and secular opposition, mainly the democracy activists and revolutionaries of the first hour were also brutally supressed.

Meanwhile, human rights organizations have registered a disturbing number of violations and a growing number of cases of systematic torture in the country's prisons; not to mention the ad hoc death penalties for alleged supporters of the Brotherhood by an arbitrary judiciary.

El-Sissi is the military's candidate

Egyptian voters have no real choice in the election because the real opposition has either been banned or intimidated. Hamdeen Sabahi, who is without a whiff of a chance, is running a hopeless street election campaign against the propaganda machinery of the state media. He unintentionally serves as a fig leaf to keep up the appearance of democratic elections.

El-Sissi is certainly not the unselfish servant of the masses as he likes to present himself. He is and remains a man of the military. By now, nearly all state institutions are supporting him. First and foremos,t the politicized judiciary, the infamous interior ministry, the gigantic bureaucracy and the aggressively propagandistic mass media. Paradoxically, the puritanic, islamic, and politically incompetent Salafist Nur Party has even become a supporter of Egypt's new strongman, although it is unclear if they support him for purely opportunistic reasons, or because of pressure from Saudi Arabia.

In addition to the complete restoration of the repressive state, which even outshines Mubarak's police apparatus, it is particularly important to note that el-Sissi has no political experience and no vision for Egypt's future. He also has not presented any program for solving Egypt's enormous economic problems. Comprehensive structural reforms cannot be expected from him.

Don't legitimize the coup

The political order in post-Morsi Egypt is financed and supported by anti-democratic forces in the Arab region. Mainly Saudi Arabia and the conservative Gulf monarchies support the new regime because they fear a revolutionary dynamic that could inspire their own increasingly dissatisfied youth to demand more freedoms.

Furthermore, there is the fear of losing legitimacy due to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, which itself had been legitimized democratically. Egypt would have been bankrupt long ago without the financial support from the Arabian Peninsula.

The EU should attach conditions to its cooperation with Egypt because the democratic transformation is a long way off and the prospects for improvement are bleak. The EU should under no circumstances legitimize the coup from July 2013.

It is, for this reason, that the EU should not have sent election observers to Egypt in the first place because the international mission has only helped the country's new rulers.